You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns every weekday, except for a couple of days each month when it doesn't. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. My spinoff food site, Forkbastard, can be found easily enough by the clever.

September 26th

There's a lot of shit being talked right now about Iran, especially in the wake of President Ahmadinejad's visit to New York. This shit is being talked so that you, the American public, will cheer appropriately and print up rolls of toilet paper with Ahmadinejad's name on them* before we bomb their asses.

And that's fine. It's your duty as a patriotic American to buy T-shirts with comedic reworkings of Arab leaders' names on them. CafePress has any number of hideous designs already, from people who surprisingly managed to spell his name right in the keywords. But since helping jingoistic assholes sleep better at night is not part of the YAD mission statement, there are some things that need to be said about the country we're going to blunder ass-first into next.

Anybody who tells you we have been at war with Iran since 1979 is a crazy person, and should not be trusted.

This seems obvious, but it's apparently escaped the bookers at every major news outlet in the country. The idea being that the Iranian hostage crisis was an act of war, and the only thing keeping us from striking back since has been our incredible national patience and noblesse oblige. Oh, and also we wanted to sell them a bunch of weapons in the 80s and 90s. Which is what you do with countries you're at war at. It's a strategy we refined even further in Iraq - where we either "lose" a bunch of weapons, or let Blackwater sell them for us.

We're not at war with Iran. Yet.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is also a crazy person, and should not be trusted.

However, "not trusted" and "bombed" are two entirely different verbs, another fact which seems to be eluding a lot of people lately. Which leads us to another important fact.

Not everyone who says DEATH TO AMERICA means it.

Politicians say all kind of shit to keep themselves up in the polls. Hell, Hillary Clinton condemned the MoveOn ad after she voted not to condemn the MoveOn ad. Bush didn't actually get an "A" in tax cuts. Tax cuts is not an accredited course and, as a result, is graded solely on a pass-fail basis. By Grover Norquist. In his basement. Naked. Think of Death To America as a slogan. You know, like No Child Left Behind. It's not meant to be taken literally. And even if it is...

Not everyone who means DEATH TO AMERICA can actually cause DEATH TO AMERICA.

I know you're probably hearing that, after leaving New York, President Ahmedinajad headed back to Tehran, where he was just one layaway** payment away from bringing his first ICBM home. That's not actually true. Even if we did nothing, it'd be years and years before Iran got the bomb. And even if they did...

Not everyone who has the means for DEATH TO AMERICA thinks they can get away with DEATH TO AMERICA.

This, along with the preceding two rules, also apply if you substitute ISRAEL for AMERICA, by the way. Since Hiroshima, lots of countries have acquired nuclear weapons. Many of those countries have really really really really fucking disliked other countries. Yet those other countries did not get nuked. Why? Because those other countries, and/or their friends, had even more nukes. Which is why Iranians should be a lot more scared of us nuking them than we are of the inverse.

Iran may or MAY NOT be arming and helping Iraqi insurgents.

This is a biggie, because you may have noticed the news media stating this as unequivocal fact in the past week or two. Never mind that the people claiming this are the same people that said there was no way in hell those aluminum tubes in Iraq could be anything but parts for a nuclear bomb. Which was, I repeat for those of you who might be a bit thick, WRONG. See also mobile weapons labs, vials of anthrax, the entire text of Colin Powell's speech to the UN, etcetera etcetera.

And if, by some bizarre chance, these claims are actually true, and not the result of bad intelligence or a deliberate attempt to manipulate public sentiment through lies and flim-flam, the United States does not actually have much of a moral high ground when it comes to supplying weapons and training to foreign terrorists whose interests or ideologies align with ours. The same fuckers who think Ollie North is a fucking hero want to tell you the same thing's worth bombing Iran over when they do it. But then, these people are huge fans of the situational ethics of expediency, aren't they?

There's one more thing you need to know about Iran, and the debate about it, but I'm saving that for tomorrow.

*You know, the same way you did with Khomeini, Qadafi, Hussein, Bin Laden, and, er, Hussein again.